There’s lots of talk recently about the wealth of Jeff Bezos. There are maps comparing his wealth to entire countries, a “You are Jeff Bezos” game where you can spend his money on different things - like paying their fair-share of taxes, and a graphic that puts his wealth in perspective. A recurring point is that most people simply cannot fathom the amount of money he has. The number is $150 billion. My favorite attempt to bring the number into human terms is Quartz’s article, “The average US worker would need 10 times the length of all human history to earn as much as Jeff Bezos”. This beautifully captures the point that someone does not simply earn or work for such an amount of money, but rather captures it. We, at degrowth.info, thought a similar calculation would be interesting. We wanted to know how many humble (but hopefully useful) projects like ours Jeff Bezos’ wealth could pay for. In case you haven’t heard already, degrowth.info is improving its site to better support the degrowth community and improve the usability of the platform – this will cost 7,500€.
Please find below a text published in The Guardian and also in several European Countries. More than 200 academics call on the European Union and its member states to plan for a post-growth future in which human and ecological wellbeing is prioritised over GDP. More than 78,000 people already singed the petition "Europe, It’s Time to End the Growth Dependency" This week, scientists, politici...
How a feminist degrowth approach can alleviate ecological and gender injustices Is it possible to reconcile sustainable development, a fair distribution of both paid and unpaid work among genders, and an economic strategy based on growth? In our article “The Monetized Economy versus Care and the Environment? Degrowth Perspectives on Reconciling an Antagonism”, a contribution to the 2018 Femini...
Deschooling as a Path to Social-Ecological Transformation By Fabian Scheidler and Andrea Vetter "Deschooling is at the root of any movement for human liberation", wrote Ivan Illich, today almost forgotten but once a world-renowned critical thinker, in 1971. With books like "Deschooling Society" and "Energy and Equity” he inspired in the 1970s both the emerging environmental movement and the r...
